1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting apparatus which ejects a liquid onto a liquid ejection surface of an ejection target member.
Here, a liquid ejecting apparatus is not limited to an ink jet type recording apparatus, a copy machine, and a facsimile machine which eject ink onto an ejection target member such as a recording paper from a liquid ejecting head such as a recording head to perform recording for the recording paper, and is interpreted to include an apparatus which ejects a liquid, corresponding to a certain use instead of ink, onto an ejection target member from a liquid ejecting head and sticks a liquid to the ejection target member.
Examples of a liquid ejecting head include a color material ejecting head used for manufacturing a color filter of a liquid crystal display (LCD), an electrode material (conductive paste) ejecting head used for forming electrode of an organic electroluminescence (EL) display or a plane emission display (FED), a bio-organic material ejecting head used for manufacturing a biochip, and a sample ejecting head which ejects a sample as a precise pipette as well as the recording head.
2. Related Art
An ink jet printer is well known as an example of a liquid ejecting apparatus which ejects a liquid onto a liquid ejection surface of an ejection target member. For example, a serial head type ink jet printer performs recording onto a recording surface of a recording paper such that an operation of ejecting ink (a liquid) from a recording head which reciprocates in a direction crossing a transport direction of a recording paper (an ejection target member) to form a dot on a recording surface (a liquid ejection surface) of the recording paper and an operation of transporting a predetermined transport amount of recording paper in the transport direction are alternately repeatedly performed. The ink jet printer aims to control the reciprocal operation of the recording head and the transport operation for the recording paper with a high degree of accuracy and implement highly accurate recording. To this end, the ink jet printer commonly includes a linear encoder for detecting the movement amount of the recording head or a rotary encoder for detecting the transport amount of the recording paper.
In the liquid ejecting apparatus, part of the liquid ejected onto the ejection target member from the liquid ejecting head may float in the liquid ejecting apparatus in the form of mist. For example, in the ink jet printer, part of ink ejected from the recording head is changed to ink mists, and ink mists float in an inner space of the printer. The ink mists stick to the recording paper causing the recording image quality to deteriorate. Further, when ink mists stick to a scale of the linear encoder or the rotary encoder, the scale reading accuracy of a scale sensor may deteriorate. That is, ink mists which stick to the scale of the encoder cause the detection accuracy of the movement amount of the recording head or the transport amount for the recording paper to deteriorate, thereby causing the recording accuracy to deteriorate.
In order to reduce the ink mists, as one example of a related art, an ink jet printer is known in which a charging member is installed at a location adjacent to an ink ejection area in which an ink is ejected from a recording head, and the charging member is electrically charged to a polarity different from the polarity of the ink mists to thereby attract and remove ink mists generated in the ink ejection area through electrostatic force (for example, JP-A-2006-335531 and 2006-335532).
However, in the related art, the ink mists attracted to the charging member stick to a surface of the charging member only through attraction force caused by static electricity electrically charged to the charging member. Therefore, for example, due to an air current, vibration, or abrasion which is generated when a carriage reciprocally moves inside a printer, a different component or a recording paper, which is electrically charged, is attracted by static electricity, so that part of the ink mists which stick to a surface of the charging member may be separated from the charging member and fly inside the printer again. For this reason, the related art described above has a problem in that mists of a liquid which floats in the inner space of the liquid ejecting apparatus cannot be effectively reduced.